The present relates to computer systems, and more specifically, to question answering (QA) systems.
Recent research has been directed to developing question answering (QA) systems designed to receive input questions, analyze them, and return applicable answers. These systems may rely on natural language processing, automated reasoning, machine learning, and other advanced techniques. Using these techniques, QA systems may provide mechanisms for searching large sources of content and analyzing the content with regard to a given input question in order to determine an answer to the question. In some QA systems this may take the form of hypothesis generation, scoring, and ranking in order to determine a final set of one or more output answers. An example of a QA system is IBM's WATSON system.